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After the Trump Administration rightly banned Critical Race Theory (CRT) training in the federal workforce in late 2020, the Biden–Harris Administration swiftly undid the prohibition in its first day in office. The reversal sent the momentum for combatting CRT to the states, where legislatures and governors are currently considering the impact of CRT’s Marxist roots and intolerance of other ideas on K–12 school policies, such as student discipline and curricula.
Can the executives and legislators of the nation’s 50 states and the officials of the nearly 14,000 school boards determine the material that is taught in the public school classroom? Certainly. Just as state and local education officials have the authority to adopt and later change academic standards and lessons to include CRT and focus on “racialization” and “whiteness,” so, too, can educators create and recommend resources that acknowledge America’s promise of freedom and opportunity.R
Ghost in the Machine
In the last fragment of his 1951 book Minima Moralia
, one of the foundational texts of critical theory, Theodor Adorno provocatively recasts his own philosophical project in seemingly religious terms. “The only philosophy which can be responsibly practised in face of despair,” he writes in E.F.N. Jephcott’s translation, “is the attempt to contemplate all things as they would present themselves from the standpoint of redemption.” Soon, the theological language grows even more explicit: “Perspectives must be fashioned that displace and estrange the world, reveal it to be, with its rifts and crevices, as indigent and distorted as it will appear one day in the messianic light.” Adorno did not present himself as a religious thinker, yet theological concepts flash up in his work at key moments.
Holocaust and Genocide Studies 17.1 (2003) 62-88
The Holocaust and American Public Memory, 1945-1960
San Diego State University
Abstract: Until the 1960s, many scholars assert, most Americans
awareness of the Holocaust was based upon vague, trivial, or inaccurate
representations. Yet the extermination of the Jews was remembered in
significant ways, this article posits, through World War II accounts,
the Nuremberg trials, philosophical works, comparisons with Soviet
totalitarianism, Christian and Jewish theological reflections, pioneering
scholarly publications, and mass-media portrayals. These early postwar
attempts to comprehend the Jewish tragedy within prevailing cultural
paradigms provided the foundation for subsequent understandings of
that event.
Between the end of the war and the 1960s, as anyone who has lived